Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

“I’m very sorry for this clerk. But if I related to you some of the living and working conditions these pickers have to endure, you’d see they’re almost better off dead than alive.”

The pickers can always get other jobs, can’t they? I mean, there’s no Government law saying they can’t.”

“Are you a union man, Mr. Wimer — I mean a good one? Then you, of course, know you can’t be fired from your present position without an exceptionally good cause, correct? And if you’ve any complaints that can’t be settled by you directly with management, then the union settles them for you, correct? The pickers formed a union, but the major growers won’t recognize it, so no complaints are settled in any way except the way the growers want, and that’s always to the extreme disadvantage of the pickers. These pickers are relatively uneducated but very honest people, usually from a foreign-speaking minority, good family men, they know how to pick fruit, like the outdoors and accept gladly their means of livelihood. And now all they want is for their legitimately formed union to be recognized and honored by the growers, so the union can bargain directly and fairly for better wages, decent wages, the most minimum of national-minimum-wage-act wages, and for the most commonly accepted working and living conditions, which means a portable privy near their work area and dormitories that weren’t built ages ago for pigs. Now, is that asking for too much?”

“No.”

Then support us by joining the boycott movement against the illegal growers. We’re asking you — and, incidentally, this is in full accordance and sympathy from your own union organizer, Mr. Felk, at Local 79—to refuse to sell ras-, black-and loganberries in your store. And, in fact, tomorrow, in the street outside your supermarket, to publicly dump and destroy the berries you already have while TV news cameras of two local stations here take pictures of you doing it, all of which we’ll be instrumental in setting up.”

I made a few whews and good Gods into the phone and asked the man to repeat what he’d just asked me to do, which he was doing when Jennie walked over with a blackboard that listed the ingredients that were going into her “New Superspecial Famous Northern California Egg Dish tonight, which includes sweet cream, Swiss and parmesan cheese, scallions, peppers, pimientos and fresh chopped oregano and parsley,” and said “Who’s on the phone?”

I said “Union business.” And to the man: “What’s your name, if I might ask?”

“I’ll give my organizing name, which is Blackspot. Now, what do you say?”

I said why not ask the head of produce, and he said Finerman was too old, besides being in complete agreement with the berry growers and management against the pickers. “Do what I ask, Kevin, and it might be the spark to make our Eastern boycott successful. We don’t want any more firebombing. Innocent people get hurt and it looks bad for us, besides. Just dump the berries at ten a.m. tomorrow, which the stations say is the latest they can cover the story, because of previous camera commitments. We swear we’ll use every pressure we have to keep you on at the store, if they decide to fire you, and if that’s impossible, then your union has promised to place you at even a higher wage at a pro-picker store. You’ll also be stamping your own special mark for the same things your union fought for and won only twenty years ago. Now, what do you say?”

I said I’ll think it over, but he said I had no time. I said why didn’t he get a produce head of one of the giant, more influential markets to do it and he said because my store was in the news now and to gain back respect for the movement, that firebombing had to be whitewashed from the public’s mind. “What you’d do would mean that even though one of your favorite colleagues was severely burned, his fellow employees still thought so much of the movement that they forgave the firebombing and were, in fact, placing direct blame on the market owners for selling those berries.”

I said oh, what the hell, I’d do it, and he said I’d see him in front of the store at ten, then. “You’ll recognize me as an ordinary pedestrian with the most unordinary happy grin an ordinary pedestrian ever had. Pickers around the nation will never forget you for this. You’re a credit to your profession and local.”

I didn’t care about being a credit to my profession. I never had any illusions my job was difficult, or needed many physical or mental skills, though I did have to use some better judgment and really strain a muscle or two when I worked for a small market five years ago and had to get up before the pigeons do to select and buy the store’s produce line right off the trucks. Now I open crates that are delivered twice a week to the market, make sure the fruits and vegetables look appetizing and salable to the customers, which mostly means using the right fluorescent lights and straightening out the food and spraying it every other hour to give it that just-picked or rained-on look and odor, put up the price signs that management directs us to from its offices in another city and occasionally use my own mind by writing and installing cute and clever sayings on the more perishable items, such as “Act like this fruit is your mother-in-law: Please do not squeeze.” But I agreed with just about everything Blackspot said about improving the lot of the pickers, was bored with C & L after three years and didn’t mind losing my job, with two weeks’ severance pay, if I could get another one. And it’d be a kick seeing myself on television, having my wife, friends and relatives all seeing me, which’d be the most exciting thing to happen to me since my plane came back with me and my National Guard unit in it from an overseas emergency Middle East crisis several years ago and my crying wife and family nearly suffocated me at the airport gate.

“How’d you like to see me on television tomorrow night?” I said to Jennie when she set that superspecial northern-California egg dish in front of me, and she said “And how’d you like to see me in a brand-new Valentine gown?”

“But I’m serious.” And she said “And so am I. Wouldn’t I look spectacular? Now, eat up.” And to that five-month-old thing in her belly: “You, too, mister, and don’t be letting me know if you think the dish is too hot.”

The eggs weren’t very good, too bland, which not even salt would improve, which surprised me, with all the different herbs, spices and ingredients she put in it. When she asked how it was, I said “Great, fine, though still not as good as one of your plain cheese omelets or fried egg marinara, so maybe this should be the last time we have it, okay?”

“I like it. The sautéed pepper I could do without, but I like it.” She ate all her eggs and, without asking me or anything, spooned half of my eggs onto her plate, while I just sat there, thinking about how I was going to get the berries to the street tomorrow before the manager or Finerman got wind of what I was doing.

I got to work a little earlier than usual and cleaned up the produce section a half hour before the store was to open at nine. The window from the bombing the day before still had wooden planks and tape over it and the store still smelled some from the fire, even though we had used several cans of bathroom spray. One of the girl food clerks said that just before she left work last night, the manager told her the company wasn’t going to replace the window till the weekend, just to show the agitators that we didn’t think a broken window was going to lose us much business and to also show the neighborhood how difficult it was providing them with the wide selection of food products we thought they wanted. I told her I thought a broken window was sure to lose us trade, not only because it looked bad but also because it reminded customers that more agitation might come if the dispute wasn’t settled and, worse than that, of Nelson’s near death.